Mariona Miyata-Sturm: 'Effortless elegance and other epistemic'; Jakob Lohmar: 'Moral Theory and the Importance of the Far Future'
Abstract: When evaluating theories, scientists regularly appeal to a theory’s elegance, simplicity, or lack of ad hoc elements. Are such broadly aesthetic features really epistemically relevant? In this talk, I present a new picture of aesthetics in science which relates scientists’ aesthetic experiences to epistemic theoretical virtues. In brief, it says that aesthetic feelings regarding scientific theories are the felt outputs of (meta)cognitive processes responding to features of epistemic value, allowing these feelings to function as proxies for epistemic virtues. For example, feelings of elegance arise when we effortlessly ‘connect the dots’, and signal that the theory strikes a good balance between simplicity and informativeness. I illustrate the explanatory power of this picture by applying it to examples from 20th-century earth science, and explain how it fits within a larger framework for understanding the role of aesthetic considerations in scientific theory evaluation. (Mariona Miyata-Sturm)
The main strands of my research concern moral theory and the practical question of how we can act morally best. A prominent answer to the latter question is longtermism, according to which we should ideally do what is best for the far future of humanity. I discuss this view in light of population-ethical considerations and issues in aggregation. In moral theory, I discuss the concept of the moral goodness of acts, which I take to be crucial for practice but neglected in theory, and develop new solutions to paradoxes for deontology and consequentialism. (Jakob Lohmar)
